I left work a bit early because I was a bit tired (the Monday thing). But when I got home, I felt like going to a bookstore. On my way there, I noticed a smoke trail (or moisture trail that is left by plains) up in the southwestern sky (from San Jose, CA) around 7:05 p.m. It did look like a jet trail, but the thing seemed to be moving quite fast straight up. It looked a lot more like a rocket to me. So, I stopped the car to the side of the road and opened up the roof to see it better. It seemed to shoot straight up and disappeared after what seemed to be two booster fires. It was quite amazing although it was for a few minutes with all the trails.

[Just talked to our in-house rocket expert, Erik Ebert, and he told me there was a military exercise.]
————————————————————-

I guess I haven’t been to Barnes and Noble (Santa Clara, CA) recently, but when I got there, I noticed these new listening stations in their CD section (I was told that it has been a couple of months since they had them). These were made by RedDotNet. What’s different about these from other digital listening stations was that these had bar-code scanners. You put any CD under the scanner and you will be able to sample the tracks.

There were two types of stations: one with a touch-screen LCD and one without one. The one with a touch-screen LCD were mainly used to promote certain CDs with extra information. However, you can scan any other CD if you want to see the descriptions.

True, the samples are quite short (30 seconds?), some information was incorrect (one of Marian McPartland’s CD came out as some hard-rock CD), and you have to manually advance to the next track (which might be a good thing because people usually leave the station without stopping the player), but this was wonderful. I really liked it because now I can sample those CDs that I was curious about, but wasn’t inclined to buy one. The only thing is the keeping the database up-to-date, but I am sure they have a dedicated company for this.